In IT, as Elsewhere, Obama to Find Governing Differs from Campaigning

As a market researcher, I think it's great to see that statistically significant polling was accurate. So how about the transition from the Obama/Biden campaign to an Obama/Biden administration, looking at it from an IT point of view.

The campaign for the last two years has been a big fan of social computing: Twitter, YouTube and all that stuff. Now it needs to change its use of amorphous, insecure Web 2.0 technology into what we all call Enterprise 2.0. The new administration needs to combine social computing with the two-phase-commit level of accuracy that the real world expects. This is going to be tough for a technology group that couldn't match credit card numbers to duplicate donors as a campaign organization.

One thing that President-Elect Obama says he will do to make that transition happen is to appoint the United States' first Chief Technology Officer. (Eric Schmidt of Google, maybe?) If you're at all aware of how political that approach became in Massachusetts, you probably can't wait to see how that plays out nationally.